Planning Temporariness: Unpacking Time–Space Planning and Its Socially Just Applications in and Around Kolkata

Abstract

The growing uncertainties affecting Indian cities, both prior to COVID-19 and in a post-pandemic context, are not only changing the everyday needs of its citizens but also challenging mainstream planning, in envisioning urban futures and demanding new planning interventions and processes that are affordable and flexible, and yield equitable, long-lasting outcomes. This demands adoption of an alternative time–space approach in planning that aligns with Henri Lefebvre’s idea of time being interconnected with space. Consequently, it prompts both formal and informal actors to perceive the city through the ‘prism of the temporary’, a fundamental concept employed by Peter Bishop and Lesley Williams in their analysis of cities in the global South. Here, planning does not discriminate between ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ interventions. Rather, the ‘hybrid’ initiatives are threaded deliberately into the temporal layers of the city and, therefore, allow both formal and informal actors to collaborate in ‘strange’ ways and curate socially just time-bound responses that cope with a range of socio-economical challenges. To elaborate this further, the article adopts a case-study approach and critically examines a few temporary-use practices through various actors and their roles, types of spatial and institutional experiments and their contributions towards just developments in and around Kolkata. The study does not intend to replace long-term macro-spatial interventions with short-term micro-spatial practices. Rather it highlights those situations where formal urban planning fails to address the urban quandaries, and, therefore, planning ‘temporariness’ allows people and planners to explore appropriate possibilities to ‘improvise’ urban lives in India.